The Relevance of Constructions for the Interpretation of Modal Meaning: The Case of<i>Must</i>

Haan, Ferdinand de

doi:10.1080/0013838x.2012.700587

Cited by 10 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…The proportion of epistemics is substantially lower than in the corpus studies on adult speech mentioned in the introduction (Ruppenhofer & Rehbein, 2012, Rubinstein et al, 2013, Marasović et al, 2016, see also Coates, 1983, Klages & Römer, 2002, Hacquard & Wellwood, 2012, Baker et al, 2012. For some of these studies, the difference might be due to the fact that they involve written language (Coates, 1983 andHaan, 2011 show that modal use differs substantially in written vs. spoken language). But even studies on spoken adult language show a higher proportion of epistemics: in the MASC corpus of American English, Marasović et al (2016) find 26% epistemics in almost 2,000 functional modals (n = 508, their Table 5, p.17).…”

Section: Interim Discussion On the Inputmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…In what follows we treat such uses as root (as opposed to epistemic). 18 The studies that come closest are DeHaan (2011), which looks at temporal and aspectual properties of must , and Marasovi ć et al (2016), which uses the modal lemma and temporal-aspectual properties in combination with other variables such as subject and negation to tag modal flavor automatically.Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jos/article/39/4/581/6676120 by guest on 31 March 2023…”

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confidence: 99%

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Figuring Out Root and Epistemic Uses of Modals: The Role of the Input

Dooren

Dieuleveut

Cournane

et al. 2022

Journal of Semantics

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This paper investigates how children figure out that modals like must can be used to express both epistemic and “root” (i.e. non epistemic) flavors. The existing acquisition literature shows that children produce modals with epistemic meanings up to a year later than with root meanings. We conducted a corpus study to examine how modality is expressed in speech to and by young children, to investigate the ways in which the linguistic input children hear may help or hinder them in uncovering the flavor flexibility of modals. Our results show that the way parents use modals may obscure the fact that they can express epistemic flavors: modals are very rarely used epistemically. Yet, children eventually figure it out; our results suggest that some do so even before age 3. To investigate how children pick up on epistemic flavors, we explore distributional cues that distinguish roots and epistemics. The semantic literature argues they differ in “temporal orientation” (Condoravdi, 2002): while epistemics can have present or past orientation, root modals tend to be constrained to future orientation (Werner 2006; Klecha, 2016; Rullmann & Matthewson, 2018). We show that in child-directed speech, this constraint is well-reflected in the distribution of aspectual features of roots and epistemics, but that the signal might be weak given the strong usage bias towards roots. We discuss (a) what these results imply for how children might acquire adult-like modal representations, and (b) possible learning paths towards adult-like modal representations.

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Section: Interim Discussion On the Inputmentioning

confidence: 89%

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confidence: 99%

Figuring Out Root and Epistemic Uses of Modals: The Role of the Input

Dooren

Dieuleveut

Cournane

et al. 2022

Journal of Semantics

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“…To take must as an example, example (1) below shows must in its obligation meaning while ( 2) is an instance of the probability meaning. The underlined items in these two examples show co-textual features that tend to be associated with the respective meanings (Coates, 1983;Hunston, 2000;de Haan, 2012). In (1) an animate subject and an agentive verb are associated with the obligation meaning.…”

Section: Sampling -Checking Obligation Meaningmentioning

confidence: 99%

The expression of obligation in student academic writing

Vincent

2020

Journal of English for Academic Purposes

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“…Although the scarce attention to pragmatics in constructionist accounts of modals (for exceptions, see e.g. Stefanowitsch 2003;Boogaart 2009;De Haan 2012;Boogaart & Fortuin 2016) might suggest that the integration of pragmatics in modal constructions is problematic, it is certainly possible to include pragmatic information in a modal construction's representation. After all, constructions can come with pragmatic specifications (for surveys, see Kay 2004;Nikiforidou 2009; the introduction in Bergs & Diewald 2009;Lee-Goldman 2011;Cappelle 2017; introduction to this issue).…”

Section: Introduction: Modal Constructions Lexically Restricted Satumentioning

confidence: 99%

The necessity modalshave to,must,need to, andshould

Cappelle

Depraetere

Lesuisse

2019

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When an ambiguous lexical item appears within a familiar string of words, it can instantly receive an appropriate interpretation from this context, thus being saturated by it. Such a context may also short-circuit illocutionary and other pragmatic aspects of interpretation. We here extract from the British National Corpus over 500 internally highly collocating and high-frequency lexical n-grams up to 5 words containing have to, must, need to, and/or should. These contexts-as-constructions go some way toward allowing us to group these four necessity modals into clusters with similar semantic and pragmatic properties and to determine which of them is semantico-pragmatically most unlike the others. It appears that have to and need to cluster most closely together thanks to their shared environments (e.g., you may have/need to…, expressing contingent, mitigated necessity), while should has the largest share of unique n-grams (e.g., rhetorical Why shouldn’t I…?, used as a defiant self-exhortation).

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The Relevance of Constructions for the Interpretation of Modal Meaning: The Case ofMust

Cited by 10 publications

References 19 publications

Figuring Out Root and Epistemic Uses of Modals: The Role of the Input

Figuring Out Root and Epistemic Uses of Modals: The Role of the Input

The expression of obligation in student academic writing

The necessity modalshave to,must,need to, andshould

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